Acronym Soup

April 12, 2012

If you live in Washington and/or write about higher education, you swim in a sea of acronyms. Because I like making lists, I made a list of the acronyms that float through my brain on a regular basis. (This isn’t all of them, just the ones I can think of late on a Thursday night.)

Is it possible to live an acronym-free life? How many short strings of letters can our brains handle? This is, maybe, a serious question.

AAA

AAP

AAUP

AAUP

ACLS

ACRL

ARL

AHA

AHR

CLIR

CNI

DH

DPLA

FRPAA

GBS

JAH

LOC

MLA

NARA

OA

OCR

OER

PIPA

PSP

RWA

SAA

SOPA

SPARC

Key:

AAA–The American Anthropological Association

AAUP–The Association of American Publishers

AAUP–The Association of American University Presses (I sometimes say “presses, not profs,” when I use this one, depending on whom I’m talking to)

AAUP–The American Association of University Professsors (I tend to think of this as “the other AAUP” because I don’t write about this one very much)